Often astonishing pages, given greater meaning by Bowen’s own inventions

Elizabeth Bowen’s Selected Irish Writings. Edited by Eibhear Walshe, Cork University Press, €39

IN his introduction to this collection, editor Eibhear Walshe states as his intention the tracing of ‘the trajectory of Bowen’s imaginative and intellectual engagement with her own country’.

The intention is realised and Walshe’s book shows the value of exploring the degree to which Bowen’s involvement with Irish life and letters contributed to or was influenced by her own sense of displacement. He even proposes that the loss of her house, Bowen’s Court, liberated her from responsibility as a landowner and released a more radical element in her final years of work. But was this the sundering of greatest moment, late as it was? Or had Bowen’s long residence in England, and particularly among sophisticated literary Londoners, dulled her genealogical capacity to understand Ireland?

This selection of Bowen’s writings on Ireland, Irish subjects and people might be seen the answer to that question, which in itself is one of many. The thoughtful introduction in which insight replaces assumption examines both the professional and personal relationship between a writer whose every glance takes in a subject for comment or for memory, and the place from which her adult life drew a hefty weight of its creative sustenance.

The biographies can excavate the extent to which this landscape, primarily of north Cork, affected the prose, and perhaps the fiction itself. The distinction is significant: Bowen’s prose is a craft, a worked-out method of describing. Her fiction is the imaginative load carried by that rigorous craft. Walshe marks this distinction clearly, adding his own elegance of phrase in his consideration of, for example, ‘the burdened nature of her heritage’.

The value of this selection, what could be called its achievement, is in its ability to offer rather than to assert possibilities. Of course Walshe has ideas of his own, although as editor he is generous enough to usher the reader gently towards his belief that Ireland drew into the light essential contradictions in Bowen’s imagination. The pages are here for us to consider. The collection has been made through extensive research backed up by scholarship but what has to be remembered is that these reviews and essays and reports were, quite simply, work. We may read them now knowing what we know; she wrote them then knowing little more than that these were her opinions and her memories for which, when put into appropriate shape, she would be paid.

Ah, those reports, those payments! While his introduction is worth reading as a whole, Walshe is at his helpful best in his judicious treatment of Bowen’s controversial reports to the British Ministry of Information during World War Two, identifying with what Bowen described as a state of ‘lucid abnormality’ in England during the war years. Not only that, he can argue that Elizabeth Bowen had believed that by class and inheritance she occupied an ideological middle-ground between the British and the Irish which enabled her to mediate between Ireland and Britain. Yet her understanding of that ‘unique class position’ lends a wishful quality to her essays on Ireland, a quality contradicted by her treatment of Ireland and the Anglo-Irish in her fiction.

In this debate, distorted as it has been by later declarations of exaggerated outrage, Walshe provides a context of immediacy: ‘It was principally a response to the catastrophic situation for Britain following the fall of France.’ As Robert Fisk has noted, Bowen, like other writers observing Dublin in the winter of 1940, was ‘struck by the Irish predilection for ignoring the ideology of the war.’

That these reports could be termed betrayal stems from the fact that her Irish friends and the people she interviewed, from James Dillon (whom she totally misunderstood) to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and others did not know she was reporting their conversations. Reading the reports themselves (Walshe runs his selection chronologically which induces some confusion as an essay or a review collides with a Ministry document) the question arises: would her confidantes have been even more forthcoming had they known that their talks had such a purpose? Bowen understood that Ireland’s declaration of neutrality was ‘Eire’s first free self-assertion’ and states as an undisputable fact that the overwhelming wish of the Irish people in 1939 was for neutrality. She is anxious to mitigate the ignorant and tactless attitude of the British press; she notices that anti-Semitism in Ireland is on the increase, that James Dillon decided ‘to get rid of O’Duffy’ when he heard the General lapsing into ‘Hitlerian convulsions of speech’, she records the unpopularity of American support for the British, and feels the hardships and evasions of the Irish ‘emergency’, a life of dullness and deprivation; the excision of all war scenes from films, for example, giving the ‘feeling of an invented world’, one in which James Dillon’s Dáil address against neutrality is reported as ‘a remark on the pig situation.’

Dating from the 1930s to the 1970s these are often astonishing pages, given greater meaning by their relevance to Bowen’s own inventions and to the way in which, in Walshe’s words, her literary imagination was moved ‘to explode permanence’. This is what has given her novels and stories such a charge, and readers who seek that same thrill here will find it in her compelling recollections — but they could be reconstructions — of life at Bowen’s Court. Through these essays, reviews and prefaces produced for Vogue, or New Statesman and Nation or The Bell (and Walshe fills in a few gaps about her love affair with Sean O’Faolain, which lasted until Bowen met Charles Ritchie, her lover for 30 years) and several other journals and publishers sounds an authentic voice, a sturdy reminder of the risk described recently by author Francis Spufford of treating the past as ‘a theatre in which our own wisdom is confirmed’.